Friday, July 13, 2007

Inexpensive ARM9 PC/104 Looks Ideal for Robots



A LinuxDevices
article mentioned a new PC/104 form factor ARM9 microcontroller made
by EMAC that might be useful for
robot hobbyists. The board, called the iPac-9302
is based on the Cirrus
EP9302 SOC, which uses a 200MHz ARM920T CPU with
a MaverickCrunch floating point math engine. The board supports up to
64MB of SDRAM, 32MB of flash, 256KB EEPROM, and a PLD which can be
reprogrammed to support quadrature decoding, stepper control, or other
custom tasks. It supports a lot of I/O including AC97 audio, 10/100
ethernet, 1 RS-232, 1 RS-232/422/485, 2 USB 2.0 port, 16 processor I/O
lines, 16 PLD digital inputs (5v), 8 digital outputs (25ma), 8
high-drive digital outputs (500ma), 9 synchronous serial I/O lines
(SPI/I2S), 3 PWM I/O lines, 5 channels of 12 bit A/D, and 2 channels of
8 bit D/A. You can also get an optional JTAG adapter and screw terminal
board for all that I/O. And, yes, it runs Linux. The best part
is that the pricing starts at $150 in single unit quantities. For more
details see the iPac
9302 manual (PDF format).

Source: http://www.netchain.com

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